“We refused to stop publishing Cuban artists”

In 1962, Sergio Mondragón (b. 1935) and Margaret Randall (b. 1936) founded their literary journal El Corno Emplumado (The Plumed Horn) in Mexico City.1 A bilingual, transnational production, it stands out six decades later for the scope of its contents and its unwavering commitment to artistic diversity. It is also remarkable that this journal, whose 31 issues spanned the decade, constitutes a Pan-American literary archive at a time when national politics and Cold War antagonisms augmented the challenges in undertaking such a publication. Though criticized at the time, the journal's inclusionary approach was an ingenious response to the sociopolitical pressures and competing ideas of freedom in circulation during the decade. Considering the journal's history and its editorial team's navigation of these pressures provides an opportunity to examine the nuances of inter-American countercultural publishing and institutional ideologies, especially as they offer a distinct approach when compared to venues bound within and to the U.S.

El Corno Emplumado emerges from an inter-American countercultural and Beat dialogue. As an illustrative example of this exchange, in 1959, Barney Rosset's New York-based Evergreen Review, perennial home to Beat writers, published Volume 2, Number 7, which bore the subtitle "The Eye of Mexico." The issue contains works by Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, and many other Mexican and American writers. In it appears an English translation of an allegorical manifesto, "The Cactus Curtain: An Open Letter on Conformity in Mexican Art," written by Mexican artist José Luis Cuevas (1934-2017). A leading figure in the Generación de la Ruptura,2 Cuevas's parodic letter sends up a set of moribund Mexican muralists at the same time as it draws a parallel between Mexican and Soviet state censorship. The manifesto's enthusiasm and radicalism resonate with Beat sensibilities, and as Claire F. Fox reveals, during his years at Mexico City College, Cuevas himself would have "imbibed a hearty diet of existentialist philosophy, Beat poetry, and Latin American avant-garde literature."3 The aesthetic links here are more than provisional. Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs were variously in Mexico City in the first half of the decade, and their presence, to varying degrees, generated an aesthetic dialogue that took shape toward the end of the decade. At that same moment in the late '50s and into the early '60s, Randall was participating in the underground literary scene in New York, attending readings and publishing pieces with Kulchur, while Mondragón, her future editor-collaborator, was interviewing persecuted artists in Mexico City.   

Remembering El Corno Emplumado, one in a series of pamphlets on little magazines published by Edric Mesmer's "Among the Neighbors," contains a translated statement by Sergio Mondragón and an interview by Mesmer with Margaret Randall, both of which provide invaluable insight into the development and operations of El Corno Emplumado from late 1961 until the publication of its first issue in January 1962. Mondragón opens his story of the magazine by noting that he was working on an interview with muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros for the magazine Revista de América. At the time, Siqueiros was imprisoned for social dissolution under President Adolfo López Mateos.4 Mondragón attended a reading by San Francisco Beat poet Philip Lamantia, then in Mexico. Lamantia introduced Mondragón to Margaret Randall, who Lamantia met in New York. Randall and Mondragón collaborated on translations that attracted the attention of poets and artists in Mexico City, at which point they realized the "need for a magazine that would showcase 'both worlds': that of Hispano-American poetry and that of poetry from north of the border."5 Along with poet Harvey Wolin, who stayed on for three issues, they began El Corno Emplumado, a plumed horn whose name fuses the American jazz horn and the plumage of Quetzalcoatl.6

Mondragón registers the paradigm shift in Mexican poetry that enabled the magazine. He notes that Mexican poets were no longer "professing a total devotion to formal perfection, the color gray, the discreet tone, a lineal discourse, idiomatic purity, anecdotal transparency, etc."7 Similarly, American poets "no longer thought or wrote like T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound."8 Picking up a Beat ethos, El Corno Emplumado was the magazine of a "world, not to be globalized but to become profoundly personal although readily shared," and it found itself amidst a counterculture manifesting in Mexican art and letters.9 Driven by Randall's organizational talents and a list of distributors courtesy of Arnaldo Orfila Reynal, then director of the Fondo de Cultura Económica, El Corno established an international presence immediately. Randall describes her own vision for the magazine as one of capacious inclusion, a desire "not to favor any single group of poets or poetic style."10 Randall further reveals her editorial commitment writing, "the only criteria that would keep us from publishing a poem would be if it was fascist or racist in its content."11 She also provides a list of concurrent journals and magazines that she recognized as kindred publications, these included journals from Argentina, Cuba, Venezuela; American mainstays like The Floating Bear, Kayak, and Evergreen Review; and two Mexican journals edited by women "Thelma Nava's magazine, El Pájaro Cascabel, and . . . El Rehilete edited by Beatriz Espejo."12

In retrospect, the editors' work effectively represented the two worlds Mondragón mentions. The role of the first five issues includes Juan Bañuelos, Carol Bergé, Ernesto Cardenal, Robert Creeley, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kathleen Frasier, Allen Ginsberg, Thelma Nava, and Pablo Neruda, among many others. However, the magazine attracted its share of critics for both its nondiscriminatory editorial practices and its means of securing funds for publication. In his book, The Poetry of The Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures, Harris Feinsod fits El Corno into larger strategies of hemispheric cultural diplomacy, that is, "foreign policy collaborations between private cultural institutions and government agencies of the United States, Cuba, Chile, and elsewhere," and he documents challenges to the editors' artistic vision and their practical operations.13 He charts three major phases of the journal "from an 'apolitical' expression of countercultural brotherhood to a key site of neo-avant-garde cross-fertilization, and then into a shadow institution of hemispheric cultural diplomacy."14 Feinsod's work demonstrates the need for thinking hemispherically and in dialogue with politics rather than from the starting point of U.S. hegemony when understanding twentieth-century inter-American poetry. Yet, the phases he charts for the magazine may not be so clearly defined. Inspired by post-war poetic diversity and the ongoing Civil Rights Movement, El Corno was decidedly political from the start. The magazine's integrationist approach, firmly espoused by Randall, served as a corrective to delimited, and often nationalistic, canons, coteries, and schools.15

Thinking of El Corno as avant-garde helps to contend with its unique heterogeneity. In Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital, Sophie Seita undertakes to "treat little magazines as avant-garde communities and art objects in themselves."16 By emphasizing little magazines' community formations and physical compositions, Seita steps away from a definition of a singular avant-garde that posits pre-determined aesthetic experiences, political stakes, or anti-institutional commitments. In particular, she points to feminism's critique of the avant-garde's anti-institutionality, reminding readers that "many soi-distant anti-institutional avant-garde enterprises often served the institutional careers of men."17 Clayton Eshleman, for instance, "privately critiques Randall's inclusiveness" among peers, betraying an inappropriate possessiveness over a publication to which he contributed.18 With these stakes in mind, inclusivity becomes a provocative term with which to query El Corno's contents.  

If what sustained El Corno was its radical commitment to inclusivity, no two issues better exemplify this organizational force than issues 7 and 23. They contain a significant repository of work by Cuban poets at a time when, due to U.S. sanctions and nationalist Cuban literary priorities, it was difficult and, in some cases, ill-advised to provide a venue for Cuban poetry. Beat-adjacent publishing experiments, such as issues 7 and 23, are now invaluable for studying how a poetic correspondence between the U.S. and Cuba persisted through censorship, trade restrictions, and ideological divides.

In most regards, issue 7 represents the broad field of American poetries that its editors cultivated. Forgoing a customary editor's note about the issue's contents, the editors instead draw attention to "what is happening elsewhere" in the world of poetry.19 They direct their readers to the back of the journal, where they might find an "incomplete and spontaneous" list of "new magazines" that "should serve to tune the world in on a network."20 Over two pages, this list sprawls to include dozens of journals from around the globe — North and South America, Europe, and Asia — categorized as "magazines speaking for peace through art."21 It is a generous gesture befitting the journal's values, offering a bibliography-in-waiting for scholars interested in studying little magazine networks in the 1960s.

In addition to selections of ungrouped poetry in English and Spanish, issue 7 publishes three nationally-defined groupings: Poesía Nadaísta de Colombia [Colombian Nadaist Poetry], Poesía de Nicaragua, and Poesía de Cuba. In the twenty-four pages set aside for the poetry of Cuba, the issue prints work by fourteen male authors, each of whose work appears in its original language. The section, Poesía de Cuba, is only bilingual in the sense that it has one poem written originally in English, Sulayman Abdallah Sharif Shleifer's (then Marc Schleifer, founding editor of Kulchur) "Juan Pedro Carbo Servia Running Thru the Palace Gate," whereas the rest of the texts appear untranslated in Spanish. If El Corno's assumption of a truly bilingual readership is a refreshing break from the monoglot offerings of other little magazines appealing to global anglophone audiences, then the journal's graphic design snaps us back to a familiar countercultural sensibility. One encounters the little magazine mainstay of found art, this time in the form of reprinted tarot cards, alongside reproductions of art by California artist Raymond Barrio and Mexican surrealist Carlos Coffeen Serpas. One unexpected inclusion, however, is the first text one finds in the section Poesia de Cuba: Fidel Castro Ruz's "Palabras a los Intelectuales."     

Castro's "Palabras a los Intelectuales," from the text of a speech originally delivered in June 1961, appears out of place within a section dedicated entirely to poetry. Reprinted as a fragment, the speech might be thought of as a framing text for the poetry that follows; that is, an artistic manifesto that orients readers in the manner that the later section title, Poesía Nadaísta de Colombia, promises the aesthetic coherence of a movement. Issued during the Year of Education, the speech is a document described by Mark Weiss as "a long chilling justification of censorship and a series of slightly veiled threats."22 Even within the excerpted text, one reads the specious division between artistic "libertad formal [formal freedom]" and "libertad de contenido [freedom of content]," with the first of these freedoms being guaranteed and the second a matter of concern.23 Castro arrives at the less-than-reassuring conclusion that "Revolucion solo debe renunciar a aquellos que sean incorregiblemente reaccionarios, que sean incorregiblemente contrarrevolucionarios."24 ["The Revolution should only renounce those who are incorrigibly reactionary, who are incorrigibly counterrevolutionaries."]25 The autotelic mandate through which the Revolution renounces those it deems counterrevolutionaries by way of its own assessment leads to the excerpted Palabras's inevitable proclamation: "¿cuáles son los derechos de los escritores y de los artistas revolucionarios o no revolucionarios? Dentro de la Revolución, todo; contra la Revolución ningún derecho."26 ["What are the rights of revolutionary or non-revolutionary writers and artists? Within the Revolution, all; against the Revolution, no rights."]27 Castro's forbidding words directly conflict with El Corno's radical openness, yet Randall's excitement for the Revolution and its promises continued for the duration of the journal's lifespan. In the fact of this speech's publication, one sees the impulse to include voices sequestered and maligned by the U.S. as offering a gloze. Better judgement may have excluded a piece teeming with brazen authoritarian sentiment.

From Ginsberg to Schleifer, Beat enthusiasm for Castro and the Revolution manifested a certain poetics. In Amiri Baraka's (then LeRoi Jones) 1961 Cuba Libre, a travelogue sponsored by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee that Todd F. Tietchen classifies as a Cubalogue, an "explicitly political subgenre of Beat travel narrative," Baraka relates his firsthand experience of the Revolution in Cuba.28 According to Baraka, he met Fidel on stage during an all-day political rally and rural celebration of the Agrarian Reform Law. Baraka asked Castro, "What did [Castro] intend to do with this revolution." Baraka records Castro's response: "'That is a poet's question,' he said, 'and the only poet's answer I can give you is that I will do what I think is right, what I think the people want. That's the best I can hope for, don't you think?'"29 This exchange inverts the expected roles of its interlocutors: Baraka leads with a political question, and Castro responds as a poet. Rafael Rojas argues that "[t]he Cuban Revolution radicalized Jones intellectually and politically, opening him to the world of Afro-Caribbean literature through the poetry of Nicolás Guillén and Aimé Césaire."30 Cuba Libre and El Corno Emplumado issue 7 emblematize the mystique that the Revolution generated for American poets, artists, and intellectuals appearing to them, as it did, in countercultural fragments from sources on the ground. Unfortunately, these transmissions did not amount to reportage, and anti-hegemonic, countercultural enthusiasm too often appropriated national politics for private purposes.

In fact, Cuba had its own institutions for authorizing and spreading revolutionary literatures. For José David Saldívar, the Casa de las Américas Prize, founded in Havana in 1959, played an invaluable role in this process, transforming Havana into "an alternative artistic and cultural (not only political) capital for the region."31 The organization, Casa de las Américas, "was created as a way to continue an intercultural exchange with the Américas and the planet in the face of the U.S. blockade of everything Cuban."32 Fayad Jamís has two poems in issue 7, and one of them, "Por Esta Libertad [For this Freedom]," is the titular poem from his 1962 collection that won the Casa de las Américas poetry prize in the year it was published. Jamís's biographical note at the back of the journal includes a reference to this fact as well as stating that he "today works for the newspaper 'Hoy'" (186). The Spanish version of his biography elaborates on this detail including a clause, "Acualmente integrado a la Revolucion trabaja en el diario Hoy. [Currently integrated into the Revolucíon, he works at the newspaper Hoy]."33 In 1965, the newspapers Revolución — "the official Castro Newspaper from 1959 until 1965" — and Hoy would fully merge to form Granma, "the pre-eminent voice of the Communist Party" that is still running as of this writing.34

Jamís takes the title for "Por esta Libertad [For this freedom]" from the refrain clause that structures the poem. The poet cites a number of freedoms that he observes around him. Sometimes, these freedoms are metaphorical abstractions, including "la noche de los opresores [the nighttime of the oppressors]" and "el imperio de la juventud [the empire of the youth]." Other times, the freedom is located within a more concrete image, as in the opening line, "Por esta libertad de canción bajo a lluvia [For this freedom of song beneath the rain]." In either case, the freedoms exact their toll as the repeated clause is paired with the individuated, sobering line "habrá que darlo todo [we will have to give everything]."35 On the one hand, we can detect moments inflected through the Revolution's so-called "politics of frugality" that would gain momentum throughout the decade.36 On the other hand, Castro's totalizing vision of artistic libertad as communicated within "Palabras a los Intelectuales" stipulates that freedom results from active participation within the ongoing revolution. The poem's ambiguity enables the interpretation that freedom is both phantasmagoric and exceedingly burdensome. In this way, the poem's significatory potential exceeds the political commitments of the author, as well as the Casa de las Américas and Randall and Mondragón, offering a powerful reminder of language's ingrained resistance to coercive control.    

The next time El Corno Emplumado so prominently featured Cuban poetry was in issue 23, from July 1967 — a publication date chosen as an homage to the Cuban Revolution's origins as the "26^th of July Movement." In the interim, El Corno Emplumado grew its worldwide distribution network. In 1963, the back cover of issue 7 lists prices in four currencies. In 1967, issue 23 represents fourteen currencies, having expanded through Latin America and now including European and Australian pricings. Issue 23 advertises its contents on the front cover with a colorful illustration of Cuban barbudos by Mexican artist Felipe Ehrenberg that prominently incorporates the words "Poesía Cubana." Unlike issue 7, issue 23 contains a bilingual editors' statement that helps us understand how they imagined El Corno Emplumado'scultural work. In condemnation of the American blockade of Cuba, the editors in issue 23 write,

The reaction was swift. As Randall recalls in her memoir, To Change the World: My Years in Cuba, upon publishing issue 23, the editors

It is therefore difficult to distinguish between the economic blockade proper and the cultural blockade such as they affected the magazine. In To Change the World, Randall recounts her own 1968 introduction to Castro: "Fidel turned and said: 'Oh, Margaret Randall. I've read your Corno Emplumado, a very fine magazine. The issue devoted to Cuban poetry was wonderful.'"39 The revolutionary government, apparently, subscribed and approved of issue 23 whose contributors included future President of Casa de las Américas, Roberto Retamar, Nicolás Guillén, and one of Guillén's students, Nancy Morejón. Subsequent issues included Cuban poets: issue 25 featured a tribute to Che Guevara and issue 28 contained a section devoted to Cuban poetry. However, issue 28 was the last issue in which Mondragón is listed as editor along with Randall. Randall appeared as editor for three more issues with Robert Cohen joining for the final two issues, 30 and 31.

El Corno Emplumado ended decisively when the Mexican government withdrew its subsidies from the magazine in 1968 and Mondragón and Randall went into hiding in 1969. The little magazine publicly sided with the Mexican Student Movement and denounced the Tlatelolco Massacre of October 2, 1968, which resulted in the loss of funding and threats of violence from governmental functionaries.40 It was not global or hemispheric pressures, nor a lack of public interest, that undid the magazine, but an authoritative regime in Mexico responding to the journal's criticisms. Moreover, when Randall returned to the United States in 1989, she stood trial under the McCarren-Walter Act, threatened with deportation.

By transgressing cultural and political boundaries with an uncharacteristic commitment to inclusivity, the journal produced a discourse between its editors, contributors, and readers who would otherwise have no means to conduct cultural and intellectual exchange. The cultural blockade between Cuba and the West was one such historical impediment to wider exchange, but Randall's resistance to imagining herself as an inscrutable tastemaker also brought voices and forms into conversation with one another that would have struggled to find a place in more established publishing venues with clearer stylistic attachments. In this regard, I am reminded again of Seita's treatment of avant-garde little magazines when she observes the "ongoing processes of community building in their pages and beyond," even as she maintains that community is a value-neutral term registering both organization and "deficiencies, exclusions, and differences."41 If El Corno's serialization and Mondragón and Randall's names on the masthead imply one continuous effort, then the extreme complexities of Pan-American politics, poetries, and artistic movements in the '60s, which remain unevenly and evidently dispersed within El Corno's 31 issues, dismantle that unity's illusion. It is anachronistic to suppose that the journal's founding vision, a showcasing of both worlds, might have been obtainable when the editors themselves had no way of understanding entirely either world before they began receiving submissions. Worlds don't write poems. Therefore, I propose we see El Corno, in all its rough excesses, as a repeated human act of openness in an era of suspicion, conformity, and closing of ranks.     

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Joseph Fritsch researches poetry, Caribbean literature, and Environmental Humanities. He received his doctorate from Emory University. He is pursuing an MFA in poetry at UMass, Amherst, where he teaches.

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